David Surface
Carmen Who Lives by the Lake
The first true story John heard about sex was about someone he knew, a
wild, beautiful boy, diabetic since childhood, whose parents supplied him
with sports cars he kept wrapping around trees and walking away from,
unharmed. In this story, a group of kids are drinking quarts of vodka around
a bonfire near the railroad tracks when the boy and his girlfriend disappear
into the woods. After a while, there's the thunder and scream of a train
passing by, followed by another scream. A moment later, the boy comes staggering back into the firelight, his right
hand dripping red, blood spattered all over his shirt and mouth. Because she was on the
rag! The storytellers howled with laughter -- John couldn't tell if it was
with disgust or admiration or some third feeling he couldn't name. Their
laughter felt dangerous to him; he imagined that if he tried to join in, they
would hear the lie in his voice, then turn that hard laughter on him and cut
him with it until he bled.
With girls, he felt safe. They would look him in the eye longer than any
boy would, so he trusted them. And they trusted him. They would sit very
close and tell him their troubles while the warm smell of their skin or the
sudden curve of a breast caused a quick, stabbing pain that left him confused
and irritable. That he had never touched anyone -- at sixteen -- was a small
but real worry. Listening to some other boy brag about getting some wool,
some stinky, John saw the boy's face burn red and thought that all boys are
sad, frightened liars. He knew he didn't want to be one. He wanted to love a
girl without having to be a boy.
John had grown up indoors, drawing pictures and making up stories, and had
missed out on the usual boyhood rituals. The first time someone threw a
basketball to him during gym class, he'd frozen like a squirrel before an
oncoming car, then blindly threw the ball to a player on the other team. The
other boys surrounded him and screamed in his face for what felt like an
hour, calling him pussy until his mind went blank. What kept coming back to
him later was not the names or angry voices, but that moment when he chose to
throw the ball, how he'd betrayed himself by pretending to know what he was
doing. The thought of the same thing happening in bed or in the back of a car
with a girl was unbearable.
He thought for a while that the problem might be the town -- driving
up and down the by-pass with the same neon signs he'd known since
birth scorching their letters deeper into his brain, he felt sure
of it -- the girl who would have him was not here. He would have
to go out into the world to find her. Unless, somehow, she came
to him first.
He saw her for the first time from a long way off, walking home from
school with two other girls on the right side of the road. She was smaller
than the other two and dressed in darker colors. She walked looking down,
body curled forward slightly as if against a cold wind. It looked as though
she was carrying some kind of heavy package in both arms; when she was closer he saw she was
cradling her own breasts.
In a school where nothing ever seemed to happen, it was easy to find out
about new people. Her name was Carmen, and she had just moved to town with her
father, an architect who had come all the way from Massachusetts to build a
new type of bridge over the interstate north of town. John had already driven
under the skeleton of that bridge many times. It was needle-thin, straddled
the highway like a giant spider, and only blocked out a few stars.
Carmen was a small girl with a plain, childish body and the full breasts
of a grown woman that she did her best to conceal. Her black hair was cut
short, with what there was of it pushed up by a dark hair-band. Under boyish
black eyebrows, her wide eyes looked even wider with their pale,
water-colored irises. There was a small, exploding sun of gold in her right
eye that would show up whenever the real sun struck it, but never under
electric light. Her eyes, together with her spiky crown of hair, gave her the
appearance of being permanently startled, which made John want to stroke and
calm her.
Like him, she preferred to keep quiet and take in what was going on
around her, so it was a while before he heard her talk. When she did, it made
him think of church bells underwater. The next time she spoke, he told her.
"I like your voice. Your accent, I mean."
She turned her startled look on him and said, "Why?" He thought it was an
extraordinary thing to ask. Because you're not from here. Because I don't
feel like I'm from here either.
"Because," he said, "It's pretty. It's different."
"Not to me," she smiled shyly. Then, before he could decide to feel hurt,
"Thanks. I just never thought it was anything special, that's all." When he
saw how uncomfortable he'd made her, he knew he'd have to do something
quickly to take the attention off of her.
"What about me?" he asked, "Do I sound different to you?"
She looked up, considering. "Yes."
"Do I sound dumb?" he drawled, doing his very best southern hick voice.
Laugh, he thought.
She laughed. "You do now."
"But you can understand me, right?"
"Sure. I can understand you."
One day between classes he found her pencil on the floor. He didn't know
it was hers until he picked it up and put it in his pocket, intending to keep
it, then smelled his fingers. It was her smell. Some kind of scent she wore,
like nothing else he'd smelled before. He started to walk through the school,
looking for her among all the other faces and bodies in the halls, reaching
up to smell his fingers to reassure himself he wasn't mistaken. In a few
minutes the bell would ring for the next class and it would be too late. The
he saw her from behind, head down, making her way through the crowd. He ran
up behind her and put one hand on her shoulder. She jumped a little, turned
and stared at him, then laughed her good laugh. "You scared me!"
"Here," he said, still panting for breath, holding out her pencil. She
stared at it like he'd just pulled a dove or a ball of fire out of his
pocket. "It's yours."
She reached out for it cautiously like she thought it might disappear,
then took it. "Yeah," she said, then, "How did you know it was mine?"
"I could smell you," he said without thinking, "It smells like you." He
waited to see what she would do.
She looked at him for a moment, then smiled, "Thanks." She didn't run
away, was what he kept thinking. That was all he needed.
She had two laughs. One was a kind of unhappy bark she reserved for
something she could see coming. When she laughed that way, her face didn't
change much, and her eyes looked large and disappointed. The other laugh was
for things that took her by surprise; she'd screw up her face and shake, her
eyes shrinking to two bright glints she'd turn on him like she couldn't
believe she was really laughing this hard and needed him to confirm it.
He liked the easy way they became friends. It was the crossing-over part
that was hard for him. He was too polite to make a move on any girl he wasn't
already friends with. By the time he'd made friends with a girl there was
something strange, almost indecent, about wanting to touch her, like wanting
to touch his own sister or cousin.
It had been like that with Beth, the first and only girl he'd ever dated.
For five months they'd done nothing more than kiss and hold hands.
Beth, who was a year older and almost as shy as he was, started
going to other boys who would do the things she wanted without making
her ask. Once when he'd been going on about Beth, Carmen looked
at him and said, "You know, Beth's not as perfect as you think she
is." Her eyes were bright with a kind of anger he'd never seen in
them before; it helped hold off the pain of what she was telling
him and from that moment on, this was the way he would picture her
loving him -- catching him in a screw-up, rescuing him from one
wrong idea after another.
Carmen lived in a house her father had built at the edge of the lake
north of town. He had designed it himself according to a personal interior
logic that was new to John. John's house, where he lived with his parents,
seemed to have been born the way it was, with all the objects in it created at
once. Carmen's house felt random, chaotic and warm. Its walls and angles
confused and excited him.
On one of the last warm days in September, she invited him out for a
swim. A few trees had already started to turn, and except for the distant hum
of a motorboat on the opposite shore, they were the only two people in sight.
John had the feeling they were closing down the lake for the winter, that it
was already past time, and the two of them were breaking some kind of curfew.
John was glad the day was a little cold so he could keep his shirt on. He
was ashamed of his thin chest and kept it covered all summer, even when he
went into the water. What was hardest about this was the memory of being five
or six in his grandparents' garden and taking off his shirt to run, how he'd
loved the way his skin warmed and tightened over his stomach and chest, the
buzzing feeling the wind made on his nipples. Over and over, he'd bare his
chest to the hot sun and dangerous bees, knowing that this was what he liked,
this was what he wanted to be forever. I want to be a pirate...
"You look like one," Carmen said. John looked up, startled. How did she
know?
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know," she smiled her good smile, "You just kind of look like
one today. Maybe it's your hair."
He saw her
eyes travel down the front of his body and the blood in him surged so fast
that it hurt. Then he saw she was laughing. "You're getting your shirt wet."
John looked down at the blue denim darkening around his waist and suddenly
felt stupid. Quickly, he unbuttoned his shirt, his hands working underwater
to reach the last few buttons, and threw it back on shore.
As the sun began to bury itself in the trees, their voices started to
echo as if they were under a giant glass bowl someone was slowly lowering
over their heads. When they noticed that the air had turned cooler than the
water, they gathered their things and walked back to the house.
Since Carmen's parents were away, no one had turned on the lights and
Carmen went around flicking switches that popped like gunshots in the empty
house. The small fear that John had felt down at the lake had grown to a
definite ache in the back of his throat, and he was grateful when Carmen
brought them two mugs of tea from the kitchen. They sat drinking their tea
while the light faded from the windows and the spaces between their talk grew
wider and wider. When John felt he couldn't make it through the next silence,
he put his hand behind Carmen's neck and drew her toward him. She didn't pull
away, but set the muscles in her back and gave him something to pull against
until she was all the way there. Her kisses were tentative and serious.
Despite the warm shock of her mouth moving on his, it felt strangely
familiar, as if this was something they'd practiced together many times. The
first time her warm tongue slipped into his mouth he felt an electric shock
go through him. They stayed this way for a long time, sitting upright,
touching only with their mouths. When they finally lay down together, he was
shaking so hard he had to stop and let her hold him. She held him lightly,
touching only his shoulder and hip; he wished she would hold him tighter to
help make the shaking stop.
The first time he reached up and cupped her full, warm breast
in his hand, she drew away from him and sat up and he thought it
was over, he'd gone too far -- until he saw her lift the striped
knit shirt over her head and pull it off, her bra glowing ghostly
white in the dark. When they started again, it was like walking
through a series of doors into a hugeness that almost frightened
him. To hold on, he focused on the small particulars -- the brown
freckles between her neck and shoulder, the tiny, tarnished metal
clasp at the front of her bra, the worn Navaho patterns of the sofa
cushions behind her head.
He reached behind her back and fumbled blindly at her bra, looking for a
clasp. "Wait," she whispered, "Let me do it." In amazement, he watched her
reach between her breasts and undo the tiny clasp and let the twin cups fall
away. Her breasts were larger than he'd dreamed, full and round with
impossibly soft, milky skin. Her nipples were like smooth brown pebbles, so
small they looked lost. He wanted to put his mouth on them. He cupped her
breasts in his hands and gently lifted them, wondering at their warmth and
heaviness. Slowly, he brought his mouth to her left nipple and felt it
tighten between his lips. "Is this alright?" he asked. He didn't know what
he'd do if she said No. He was beyond stopping.
At first he thought she hadn't heard him. Then he heard her answer,
"Yes," her voice sounding small and tight in her throat. He took
her breast back into his mouth and started to suck while she cradled
his head in her arms. He could taste a little salt from her sweat,
and a trace of another, sharper flavor he couldn't name, like sweet
onion grass. The harder he sucked, the tighter she pressed his head
to her breast until it was flattened against her ribs. He rose up
for a moment and looked down at her body he'd waited so long to
see, her left breast glistening wet where his mouth had been, her
right breast dry and neglected-looking. He wanted to get both of
them into his mouth at the same time. He pushed her breasts together
as close as he could and went from one to the other, taking huge,
hungry bites. She arched her back silently like an animal stretching, then slid her thigh
up between his legs and pressed it against his cock that was aching and
straining hard against his jeans. He knew if he didn't come soon, he would
die.
When her hand reached down for the first time, his heart stopped. He
listened for his heartbeat but couldn't find it, only the unbelievable music
of his belt buckle clinking under fingers that were not his own. He rolled
over onto his back and felt the cool air hit his cock as she released it into
the open, then her small, warm fingers stroking and pulling with patience and
insistence. The feeling was like a sun growing bigger and bigger inside,
blinding him. The small part of him that still couldn't believe this was
really happening, spoke.
"Wait..."
Her hand stopped moving. He could hear her breathing close to his ear.
"You don't want to come?" she asked, sounding surprised -- at the sound of the
word from her lips he knew it was too late. He dug his head backward into the
pillow and groaned as the first spasm took him. Carmen made a breathless,
startled sound and started pumping harder and faster to keep time
with his spurts, each one filling his brain with white-hot light that made
him go blind for a moment.
When he could finally open his eyes again, the room was full of the warm,
salty sea-smell of his own come. He saw her familiar face looking down at
him, her eyes wide like she'd surprised herself. He didn't realize he'd
made so much noise until she asked, "Are you alright?" and he folded her into
his arms and laughed like she'd just told him the best joke he'd ever heard.
After that, they made love regularly, or as often as they could
living at their parents' houses. Late at night, red-eyed and weary
from waiting for everyone else to go to bed. They always started
out the same way, talking until they'd run out of things to say,
then him slipping his hand behind her neck and bending her toward
him, pulling against her muscles' slight straining in the opposite
direction. Every time, it took exactly the same amount of effort,
no more and no less. He believed that this would change in time.
He loved her house in the woods, the colored glass windows, narrow like a
church's, throwing light out over the leaves. He loved the long walk to her
door, how he could use that time to think of who he was and where he was
going and what he was going there for. This house, their house, seemed so
holy to him that sometimes it was enough all by itself. He'd stand outside in
the leaves and watch her family moving around inside and feel a kind of love
for all of them. Sometimes when he was watching, a light would go on in a
house across the street or someone would pull into the driveway next door;
he'd wonder how he must look and thought of what would happen if some
well-meaning neighbor called the police. It made him smile just to think
about it, how the policemen would walk him up to the door, how they'd open
the door and smile, Oh yes, we know him. He could picture this scene and
feel warmer, even with the cold eating into his feet and hands.
When they made love in his car it was always in the front seat. There was
more room in the back, but somehow they never ended up back there, partly
because he felt stupid asking her to go to the back seat with him, so he
imagined it was how she would feel too. And because once they'd started
kissing he was afraid of having to stop and start over. Somehow they made it
work. The steering wheel, the rearview mirror, the automatic gearshift all
made room for them. He liked it best with her on top because he could keep
from coming longer. On winter nights the windows would be white with steam,
blotting out the outside world except for a few abstract smudges of light. He
loved the way the cold air felt on his cock when she rose up, then the heat
of her pussy swallowing him again when she moved down; then the cold, then
the heat. He thought of a lighthouse beacon making the sea safe for sailors
at night, and that was the word he heard inside every time she moved down on
him. Safe. Safe.
He knew what he wanted but didn't know how to ask. All the words he knew
for it seemed wrong, either too ugly or too silly but he said them anyway
because he felt he could now. "Will you eat me?" The words came out strange
and clumsy in the dark. He hoped she'd laugh out loud, not stay silent and
make him suffer. Finally she gave a quick burst of a giggle and he laughed
with her in relief and gratitude. After a moment she answered.
"I don't think I want to." She said it carefully, tentatively, as if she
was asking a question instead of answering one.
"Sure," he said too quickly, then, "Why not?" He was curious; he thought
the reason would be simple and have to do with the two of them. But when he
saw her look down, gathering her words, he realized with a cold feeling in
the pit of his stomach that he was about to get a story about someone else.
"A long time ago," she began, and he thought that this must be how all
lovers begin stories about other lovers, a long time ago, "Someone asked me
to do that. I said I didn't want to. And he called me a bitch." Here she
laughed her short, unhappy laugh. "So I don't have very good feelings about
doing that. I guess that's not very fair, is it?"
"No. I mean, it's all right. Don't worry about it." He'd listened to her
story with a feeling like something in his head was about to explode. But by
the time she was through he felt better, even stronger, knowing he was better
than that, knowing he would never do that to her; he hoped she knew. If she
didn't, he would show her; he would never ask again.
He was still self-conscious of his body around her, of his thin chest and
the hips that were too wide for the rest of him, so when he turned out the
light before they took off their clothes, it was more for his sake than for
hers. He thought that this would change in time, and it did, a little, though
whenever he had to cross the room naked and pass through a shaft of light, he
felt the pale flesh hanging from his bones and it burned him, knowing she was
watching.
Her body, to him, was a private miracle. Small as a child, there was so
much of her, so much to learn, he knew he'd never be able to know all of it.
Even if he kept going for the rest of his life, there would still be more.
"What do you call it?" he asked, because he thought he could now.
"What?"
"What do you call yourself -- here?" he asked, cupping her, holding her
between her legs.
"Nothing," she said after a while.
"What do you mean?" he looked up, smiling, and saw that she expected him
to believe this. Nothing. No name for what she had. He wanted to say the
name, but he wanted it to be the one she used. He was sure she had a name for
it and that it would be beautiful. Even if it was one of the names he already
knew, she would say it in her voice and make it beautiful. He'd thought they
would share it. Now she was telling him they would not. Even though they both
had no clothes on, he felt like he was the one who was naked.
"Nothing," he said, "That's a funny name," but what he wanted to say was,
Don't do this. Don't leave me here.
Christmas Eve, and they'd been kissing naked on the big couch in her
parents' living room for an hour before John felt brave enough to start
moving down the front of her body, kissing his way down. When he slid his
hands under her hips he could feel her go tense with what he hoped was her
own pleasure. He waited for his mind to get used to this new way of seeing
her and himself. Her hair, her scent, were amazing and almost blinded him to
what he was looking for; he couldn't believe how hard it was to find at
first. He pushed his tongue around in the bristly, chestnut colored pubic
hair until he found the soft lips and slipped the tip of his tongue between
them. What he tasted went straight to his brain and cancelled out every other
thought, except the memory of being five or six and pushing his tongue out
underwater toward the aluminum ladder, the hard, bright taste of metal
pulsing through the water to his tongue in electric waves.
Carmen jerked and a sharp laugh came out of her. "Sorry," her voice
drifted down from somewhere above. When he went back to what he was doing,
she laughed harder and rolled away.
"What's the matter?" It was difficult for him to speak.
"It tickles."
"It tickles?" He felt like he was trying to push the words through from
the other side of a deep and vivid sleep.
"Yeah," she said, pushing herself up and out of his reach on her elbows.
"Okay?" It was not really a question.
John suddenly felt the cold light falling across his naked legs and ass,
the ridiculous posture he was in. He felt a door close in his face. This is
all I will ever have of this. No one I love and who loves me will ever look
down at me from up there and say my name.
She had a dog -- her father's, really -- that lived under the house and ran
out snarling whenever he drove up. A beautiful black and white mongrel, part
shepherd and part collie, it could run faster than he could drive and
literally ran circles around his car whenever he drove down her street. The
dog, whose name was Travis, would escort him from his car to the front porch,
running a wide circle around him through the fallen leaves, then shoot up the
stairs ahead of him to be waiting at the door. He'd ring the bell and at that
signal, together with Carmen's footsteps, her unlocking and opening the door,
Travis would become ferocious for five seconds until Carmen shouted his name,
so that her first greeting to John always came together with this ritual
anger.
Inside, Travis would watch John from the far side of the room until John
sat on the floor and let his hands hang loose over his knees toward the dog.
Then, the cautious approach, the preliminary sniffing, the inevitable walk
into his open hands. It was a perfect little drama that played itself over
and over again and he loved it. Sometimes he would stay on the floor for
hours, rubbing rough circles in the animal's warm neck, thinking, This is
what I do best. This is what I love.
He wanted her to like it again. That was all. But when he tried to touch
her now, there was something in the way. And that something had nothing to do
with him -- that was what she told him. As if that would be a comfort to him.
What stopped him cold was how beyond it all she seemed. Not in any snobbish,
superior way, but with a deep sadness, a weary despair at what they were
doing -- at what he wanted her to do. It had become that, so soon -- something
he wanted her to do.
Like TB victims, he thought sunlight and fresh air could cure whatever
was killing them. He took her to mountaintops (such as they had around there),
ruined cabins, hidden rivers that flowed out of hillsides and back
underground. Once when they were lying side by side on the ground, not
touching, she started crumbling dry leaves in her hand, holding them up
against the sun and watching the flakes sift down between her fingers.
"Look," she said, "It's so great." It was the first time he'd heard pleasure
in her voice in a long time. He picked up a leaf and crumbled it himself, let
the pieces pepper down onto her creamy arm, then reached over to brush them
away softly with his fingers. Instantly, she jerked her arm away and stood
up.
"What?" he asked.
"I was doing it because it was beautiful," she said. "You were
doing it just to get on me."
He watched her walk back toward the car, stood
in a numb haze to follow her and realized she was right, that he was now
making up ploys to touch her.
There was a hill in the center of town where the hospital and water tower
were. This was where young couples had gone to park for decades, except in
winter when the roads could be too steep and slick for any car to climb, but
that was when he took her, shifting down to second gear, then third, ignoring
her questions, Where are we going? They were going to do this, he thought,
climb the hill and do this like before, although they'd never made love
here -- he was relying on the history, the spirit of the place, all the people
who had been here before to rise up and help him. And the fact that she
didn't want to be here started a little fire of anger down low in his body,
and it hit him that this was what he needed to get through his fear of her.
When they reached the top of the hill he was surprised to see that other
cars had made it here ahead of them and were parked along the lip of the hill
overlooking the town, some of them at crazy angles as if their drivers
couldn't wait to start what they'd come here for. Carmen had been silent for
a while; now he felt her silence deepen. He turned off the engine and
immediately the cold crept in, reaching through the windows to touch the side
of his face.
They sat for a minute looking at the lights of town scattered over the
dark hillside below, and it struck him how small it all looked. He thought
this was something she might like to hear coming from him.
"It looks a lot smaller than I thought. From up here, I mean."
"Really?" she spoke, her voice sounding strange and small to him, "It
looks bigger than I thought." He heard her making quiet laughing noises, then
realized with a stabbing feeling in his chest that she was crying.
"What?" he asked, touching her shoulder, all thoughts of what he'd come
here for gone. "What is it?"
"I'm just glad you're my friend," she sobbed, then folded herself into his
side, her sobbing shaking his whole body. His eyes searched the
lights outside the car as if he could find among them the thing
she'd seen that made her cry. He didn't ask why she was crying;
he didn't even feel the sting of what she'd called him (my friend)
because he was too busy feeling the warmth of her body against his
for the first time in weeks, rejoicing in her need of him, though
it was not the kind of need he'd hoped for. I can do this,
he thought, holding her tighter and stroking her hair. But soon
he couldn't help thinking that he could make her feel even better.
If she let him.
The biggest shame was this -- how could he still want it when she didn't?
If the reason she didn't want it was because she was in some kind of pain,
how could he still want it? Didn't that mean he was bad, like all men? Wasn't
that all the proof she needed? She was better than him, that much was clear.
He would dry up and blow away needing her, while she would stay the same
forever.
Another Christmas Eve, and they sat in the little room under the stairs to
her mother's bedroom with one light on behind her head and her face in
shadow, the torn paper and the gifts they'd given each other forgotten on the
floor at their feet. It was at Christmas, many years ago, that he'd first
felt the wall come down. Standing in front of the tree he'd just helped his
mother and father put up, he'd waited for the lights and the pine smell and
the music drifting in from the stereo in the next room to do their familiar
work on him, but nothing happened and the feeling was like being inside a
glass jar; the good things that got through before could not reach him and he
felt suddenly afraid that this would last and that he would feel this way
forever. He wondered (but could not ask) if it was like that for her now,
whether this was something she made happen or something that happened to her
the way it had happened to him.
He was waiting for her to say something. This was happening more and
more; she would stop speaking and after a few attempts to ask her what she
was thinking, what was wrong, he would give up and wait for her. Tonight he'd
been waiting for nearly an hour before she spoke.
"No one really does anything for anyone else." She said it without
looking at him, staring straight ahead, her eyes full of that hard and
distant look that frightened him.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean no one ever does anything for anyone else unless they get
something out of it. It's all for yourself. It's always for yourself."
He sat with his hands folded in front of him, giving his very best
impression of patience and understanding, leaning forward slightly like a
priest in a confessional, hating himself for not knowing what to say to help
her, wishing she would just let him touch her. What they did for each other
with their bodies was real -- what she was talking about now was not real -- if
she would just let him touch her, she would see that. This thing that got
inside her would go away and they would be all right again.
"I don't know," he spoke carefully. "Maybe some people just like to help
other people. Maybe they get something out of it, like it makes them feel
good. But if it helps the other person, what's wrong with that?"
She kept staring straight ahead for a moment, then turned her face toward
him in the lamplight. "You know," she said, "You think you're always going to
feel the way you do now, but you're not. You're going to be just as fucked up
as everyone else."
Later, driving home past all the houses with their Christmas lights he
decided; he would prove her wrong. He would do nothing for himself; it would
all be for her from now on. Because he loved her it would be simple and
right. It would make him happy to do it. Unless, of course, that meant he was
getting something out of it for himself, which would make her right again.
He thought about it like this until his head felt like it was going to
explode, but in the end he knew he was going to stay with it. He wanted to
defeat her by making her happy.
But by the time he turned off his headlights and ignition and rolled
silently into his parents' driveway, he was taking the same words he'd used
on her and turning them around on himself. And what difference does it make
if I don't love you anymore, as long as I do all the things I'm supposed to
do and say all the things I'm supposed to say, what difference does it make?
He knew he'd never ask this question out loud when he realized he didn't
know how to answer it -- he thought it was the kind of question only terrible
people couldn't answer.
There were many foreign students in John's English Lit class. He'd already
made friends with several of them, including a group of Iranian men and a
tiny girl from Thailand whose best friend was a Japanese girl named Keiko.
The Thai girl talked and laughed constantly while Keiko said almost nothing
and would glide silently by her friend's side, head bent patiently to catch
whatever the smaller girl was saying.
Keiko sat two desks in front of him. Though they had only smiled politely
and had never spoken, he loved watching her. She was somewhat larger than
other Japanese women he'd seen, but she moved her strong hands and solid arms
with such delicate control that she seemed much smaller than she was. Her
face was a big, calm moon that would appear from time to time out of a
curtain of black hair.
The teacher was a harmless charmer who considered it his mission to open
young people's minds. "Go out," he said one afternoon, "And do something
you've never done before."
John took Keiko to see a performance at the university theater, a company
of Flamenco dancers -- not the pretty kind, no sequins or bright colors; it
was wild, sweaty and frightening. The women stamped and fumed. One man threw
himself to the edge of the stage on his knees and started wailing a song
about the five bulls of his senses, about the five gates that would swing
open inside him.
Later, the shock of a new mouth moving against his, new breath coming
into his mouth. He was surprised at the smallness of her tongue; her scent,
which was like some kind of wonderful sourdough bread, seemed to emanate from
there. He loved the way her long black hair covered them both like a curtain
when she was on top of him. On the couch at his parents' house, she pushed
her crotch against his so hard that it hurt. He realized he'd never seen
another woman come -- he wanted to see what Keiko looked like when she came.
He reached down and unbuckled the big turquoise and leather belt she
wore, unsnapped her jeans and slid his hand down into the humid warmth
between her legs. She grabbed his wrist and started to pull his hand out
until he found her lips beneath her warm, bristly hair and started rubbing
them in slow, lazy circles. She held on to his wrist, but didn't move it
away. He kept rubbing and watched her big face grow smooth and still like she
was looking for something inside herself. She had stopped kissing him and
pressed her lips together tighter and tighter until she finally opened them
and took six or seven sharp, knife-like breaths and said a word he didn't
understand -- for a moment he thought it might be somebody's name.
When they were through and a violent thunderstorm was lashing at the
windows, he tried to make her tell stories about her childhood because that
was what he felt like hearing now. To help her get started, he told her one
of his own about the Shabby Man, the ancient, blind bum who steals bad
children out of their beds at night. He asked her what kind of stories her
parents told her when she was bad. "Who did they say would come and get you
if you were bad?"
She smiled, her great face so close. "The wind."
"The wind?" he teased her, "That's not scary."
"Yes it is! It is scary. The wind is very scary because he lives in a
cave in the ocean, all alone, and when he comes for you, you do not see him."
Earlier John had wondered if he would think of Carmen, maybe even see her
face at certain key moments the way people in movies sometimes do, but he
didn't. Afterwards he felt surprised to realize that he hadn't thought of
Carmen once.
John and Keiko never fucked, partly out of some strange kind of loyalty
to Carmen, but also because he could do things with Keiko that he'd never
been able to do with Carmen, so that fucking seemed like a waste of precious
time. With Keiko, he didn't put a name on the things he wanted for fear she
wouldn't understand, so he'd start slowly, showing her what he wanted by
doing it.
One night he was getting up from the couch when his hard cock
accidentally brushed the side of her face, grazing her cheek. "Sorry," he
laughed.
"Don't worry," she smiled, looking up at him, "Is all right."
He looked down at her beautiful moon-face looking up at him in the dark and
felt new miles of permission opening between them. "It is?" he said.
"Yes," she whispered, her smile turning a little wicked and dreamy.
Feeling brave, he took his cock in his hand and rubbed it gently against her
cheek. He'd spent hours exploring the more secret places of her body, but
this was the softest, warmest thing he'd ever felt.
"Is this all right?" he whispered.
"Yes," she said. Like a cat, she closed her eyes and rubbed her cheek
affectionately against his cock in a way that made his brain catch fire.
Feeling like he was standing outside of himself, watching, he slowly traced
the outline of her jaw, carefully avoiding her mouth. He
traced the shape of her closed eyelids, feeling her eyelashes brush against
the soft skin on head of his cock. "Is this all right?" he whispered again.
This time she didn't speak, but nodded her head slowly. He hated it when
Carmen held completely still, but this was different.
When he took his cock away from Keiko's face he saw a thread of come
stretch between her cheek and the tip of his cock, then break. He reached down
and rubbed the tiny wet spot into her cheek with his thumb. She took his
thumb into her mouth and sucked it for a moment, looked up at him and said,
"Is all right?" Before John could answer, Keiko cupped his ass in her hands, drew him toward
her and rubbed her face back and forth against his cock, brushing her nose
and lips against it without taking him into her mouth.When he saw what she was doing, John felt his mind start to tear loose
from his body.
Keiko lifted her face for a moment, looked up at him and smiled, "Is alright?"
This time it was John
who couldn't answer.
No matter how much he enjoyed what they did together, he thought of Keiko
as something he was going to have to pay for later. He kept waiting for his
punishment but it never came. The fact that it never came just reinforced his
feeling that it was out there waiting for him, gathering strength every time
he went from Carmen to Keiko and back again.
While he was seeing Keiko he could not touch Carmen, though the cause was
not obvious since he and Carmen had reached that point in their relationship
where it was not unusual for a whole series of evenings to pass without their
touching or kissing. She made him tea in her kitchen. No matter what else had
changed, no matter how far either one of them went into their anger or
silence, there was always the kettle and the brown mugs and the tea bags all
the way from England. Life could not be that bad, he sometimes thought, if we
can still do this.
Still, he hoped for more. Not to go back to what was, as it was dawning
on him that what was hadn't been as good as what could have been, but to
break through into something new. He still believed that was possible. Not
now, though. There was still too much of the old, dead love around them. To
feel the way he wanted to feel with her, they would have to become new
people. He remembered something he'd heard in school, that human beings
undergo a complete change of cells every seven years. That meant they still
had two more years to go. He didn't know if he could wait that long. He'd
have to find something to help speed up the process.
Carmen's room was at the top of a long narrow flight of stairs. Climbing
those stairs in the dark lit by colored flashes from the TV above, John's
heart would beat faster because he knew that Carmen and one of her
friends would be smoking pot, which John had never smoked and was afraid of.
Whenever Carmen brought out the red bong and the little lacquer tray of pot,
John would turn away and keep his eyes on the TV while behind him he'd hear
the flick of the lighter, the gurgling sound of water, then the long rush of
released breath and the sweet, charred smell that made him think of
Halloween. Tonight when Carmen's friend Eva routinely offered the bong, John
took it, put his finger over the tiny hole the way he'd seen them do, set the
flame to the thimble-sized bowl and drew in. He watched the white smoke
curling up inside the red plastic tube like a genie taking shape, then shut
his eyes and let the hot cloud roll into his chest. When he let go, things
were already different. Carmen joined them, and he watched her bend over and
take the white smoke into her mouth while the little flame lit up her
forehead.
When Eva left, John and Carmen stayed on the huge bed, watching TV. He
felt larger inside, more wise and generous, like there was room for
everything inside him.
"So," Carmen said, "I didn't know you had a thing for Asian women." Part
of John felt stunned, trapped, but then that feeling dissolved when he
remembered that there was no need for that anymore. They were new people now,
he told himself.
"Oh yeah," he smiled, "That. That was a while ago." He heard what she was saying and it stung him a little to realize he was
still not past lying to her. Then, one more hit and he decided that it didn't matter.
They were laying on the far side of the bed from each other, and the
space between them felt dangerous and electric to him. Carmen was laying on
her side, leaning on one elbow with her head propped up in her hand, looking
at him with a strange mix of amusement and curiosity, like she was seeing
something different in him. He felt the same way. "You know," she grinned,
speaking slowly as if she was surprised by what she was saying, "I really
feel like making love to you now."
John felt his blood surge inside, flooding his body with warmth. "You do?"
"Yeah. Do you?"
"Yeah," he returned her smile. "I do."
She reached over and kissed him once. Her kiss seemed to stay on his
mouth for a long time, even after she stood up to leave. "Excuse me," she
smiled, "I'll be right back." John watched her go, then took off his clothes
and pulled the covers up to his waist. It crossed his mind for a moment that
this might be some kind of joke, that she was not coming back and that the
next person through the door would be her brother or her Dad. Then, that
thought dissolved in the taste of her kiss still in his mouth, and he relaxed
and lay there alone, watching the TV throw its changing colors on the
ceiling, his whole body humming in anticipation of what was going to happen.
The ease. That was what stunned him. The ease of it.
Soon she was back, wearing a black kimono-like robe with white flowers.
"That's nice," he said, genuinely surprised and pleased. He'd never seen her
wear anything like this before.
"Thanks," she said, crawling up from the foot of the bed on her hands and
knees until she was poised over him. Through the split in her robe he could
see the beginning of her heavy white breasts hanging down and the deep black
shadow between them. "Well..." she smiled self-consciously, then giggled. He
put his hand behind her neck and pulled her mouth down to his the same way he
had the first time they kissed. The familiar taste of her tongue was a
welcome jolt to his brain as they gently explored each other's mouths with
the familiarity of animals. He reached up with his hands and parted her robe
like curtains and looked at the creamy softness of her naked body, the
fullness of her breasts swaying above him. The covers were still on him, and
he struggled to get them off.
"What?" she asked, "What's the matter?"
"I want to feel you," he said. She helped him pull the covers away and
climbed on top of him again, their warm legs sliding in and out between each
other, her soft pubic hair brushing against his thigh, the warm weight of her
breasts on his bare chest. It was almost too much for him. "Wait, wait," he
said, biting his lip and squeezing his eyes shut tight against the white hot
light rising fast inside him.
"It's okay," she said. "It's okay."
"No," he gritted his teeth, "I don't want to come. Not yet."
"It's all right," she said again, "Really."
"No," he said, opening his eyes again and looking at her, "Not yet," he
struggled for a way to say what he wanted to say. "I want to stay. Like this.
I want to stay like this a really, really long time." And saying that made
him suddenly feel like he could.
They lay there together for a minute without moving, her head nestled
into the crook of his neck, the familiar smell of her hair in his face. He
ran his fingertips over and over down the length of her body, from her
shoulders down the curve of her back and over the cheeks of her ass until he
felt her quiver. She rose up on her arms and looked down at him with a dazed,
serious look in her eyes. Then, still looking into his eyes, she reached down and
took his cock in her hand and gently placed the head at the mouth of her
pussy. John groaned and tried to push up deeper inside her, but she drew
away. "No," she said, "Like this. Lie still."
He did what she asked and watched her slowly moving herself back and
forth over him. She rode him so the tip of his cock pushed just inside her
lips, then out again, no deeper, but she seemed to like it because he began
to hear wet kissing sounds from down there and her face took on that sleepy,
feverish look she always got right before she came. He wanted to grab the
warm cheeks of her ass and pull her down on him, push his cock all the way up
inside her, but he made himself lay still the way she asked because he wanted
to give her what she wanted. When she came, she bowed her head and started
puffing hard breaths through her nose ("like a little freight train," he used
to say), then she bent her head back and opened her mouth, her lips moving
silently like there was a word she was trying to say.
When she was through, she lay quiet for a minute while he stroked her
ass, feeling the last little quivers run through her muscles. After a while,
she looked up and smiled, "Do you want to come?"
"Will you do something for me?" John asked.
"What?"
"Will you rub me? With your breasts?"
Carmen closed her eyes like she was picturing it, then, smiling sleepily,
crawled over John on her hands and knees and lowered her heavy breasts down
onto his belly, then slowly leaned forward on her knees, dragging her breasts
up John's stomach to his chest. He bent his head forward to watch. She didn't look into his eyes but kept
looking down at her own breasts and what she was doing to him -- it was her
sleepy, serious smile that drove him crazy. John watched until he couldn't
stand it anymore. "Here," he said in a choked voice, "Come here." Carmen
understood and brought her breasts over John's face. He took her left breast
into his mouth and sucked hard, rubbing his tongue back and forth across her
nipple until it felt pebble-hard, loving her faint salty taste. Suddenly, she
rose up on her arms and pulled her breast out of his mouth with a wet,
popping sound. "Hey," John groaned, "Come back..."
"Sorry," Carmen grinned, reveling in her power the way John had never
seen her do before. She slowly lowered her breasts back onto his face and
John began sucking again. Then he thought of the way her face had looked when she was touching him with
her breasts, and he knew what he wanted.
"Will you do something else for me?" John asked. He felt like he could
ask her for anything.
"What."
"Rub my cock. With your breasts." Carmen looked at him, and for a moment
he was afraid she was going to refuse. He saw her sleepy, wicked smile come back, then watched her move back down
and lean over his hips, her full breasts swaying back and forth over him.
Then she lowered them down and brushed them back and forth. John felt her
hard nipples graze the underside of his cock and thought he was going to
faint.
Then she took her breasts away, and before he realized what was happening,
he felt Carmen take his cock into her mouth for the first time. His whole
body jumped like she'd touched him with a branding-iron. Stunned, he felt her tongue rubbing insistently against him like a living
thing, the frightening graze of her teeth, the hot white light being drawn up
from deep inside him. When he finally dug his head back into the bed with a
loud cry, she pulled her mouth away and pumped him with her hand as he came
harder than he ever had before, until the hot white light had left him and
there was nothing more inside.
A moment later, she was back up with him again, curling into his side.
"That's the first time you've ever done that, isn't it?" he said after a
while, talking softly into her hair. In her silence he felt the blood rushing
to his brain to get there first and stop the blow he knew was coming.
"No. It's not."
In an instant she was leaning over him. "I'm sorry," she said in a
frightened voice, "I just didn't want to lie to you." She held him closer
like he was freezing to death and she was trying to save him. "It's just that
you asked and I didn't want to lie to you. Don't you understand that?"
She wasn't crying, but he held her as if she was. "It doesn't matter," he
said because he knew he should, then because he started to feel something.
"It doesn't matter, it's all right, it doesn't matter," he kept saying it over
and over. Grateful, amazed, and a little afraid that it felt true.
It was the red shirt that told him, finally. The red flannel shirt he'd
never seen Keiko wearing before, two sizes too big and rolled up comically at
the sleeves. He liked the lost child-like way she looked in it and asked
where she got it without thinking of the kind of answer he might get. The
look she gave him and the long difficult silence that followed told him all
he needed to know, but she told him more, how it belonged to the guy she'd
been seeing for two years, a graduate assistant in anthropology, how he'd
asked her to go to South America with him next semester. She didn't have to
explain that she'd said yes.
While she was talking he looked at the shirt and tried to picture the
sleeves rolled down to their full length, the broad shoulders and chest
filling it out, the untrimmed beard and pony tail, probably. He tried to hate
what he was imagining, but before he could call that feeling up, the picture
dissolved and there was only her, looking at him to see what he would do.
He took her out to a field where he used to run with his friends when
they were boys. It was the first place he'd ever drunk beer and laid down
under the stars. He'd been meaning to bring her to this place for a while, to
explain what it meant to him and help her feel it too. But that didn't seem
important anymore, and he was moving with a silent deliberation that felt new
to him. Branches reached down and clawed their faces but he went on ahead,
pulling her along behind him by the hand.
Under the harsh, blinding moonlight, he pulled her to her knees in the
cold wet grass. "Not here," she kept saying, "Not here," even while he was
rolling the red flannel shirt up above her breasts and pushing up her bra.
When he took one of her breasts into his mouth, she stopped talking. With his
mouth still on her, he opened his eyes and saw her allowing this, staring off
at some distant point on the horizon. She was looking toward whatever was
coming next for her.
There was a light on the horizon, a single streetlight shining through a
row of black trees -- this was what she was looking at. He closed his eyes
again and saw that light travel all the way across the field into her eyes,
then down through her body into his mouth, filling him slowly. As it filled
him, he was realizing that they could stay here like this until dawn and no
one was going to come and take him away, lightning would not strike him, wild
dogs would not tear him apart. Everything he thought he'd had was gone, but
that was not how this felt. He felt the beginning of something inside his
body; the longer he sucked, the clearer it grew like writing on a sign still
too far down the road to read. He wanted to know what it said.
©2000 by David Surface
